Younger types and techies tend to be more comfortable with the amorphous nature of social media and digital communication. They don’t need as much linearity or control over every aspect of content creation.

Unlike print, you can’t edit a social media-based web site until it is perfect. Since much of it’s evolution depends on how users behave and what types of content they share, you have to accept more of a role of jazz composer than orchestra conductor.

I have been looking for creative analogies to explain the differences to clients and colleagues.

Here’s what I have come up with so far (thoughts and suggestions are welcome):

• think of web as organic, as opposed to genetically modified: unpredictable and raw instead of manipulated for uniformity
• improv comedy versus sitcom comedy
• raising a child versus raising a houseplant (in terms of flexibility and hopefully not necessarily maintenance)

As a product of a liberal arts education, I have a healthy dose of critical thought coursing through my veins at all times. I can deconstruct and paradigm out with the best of them.

There have been times when I wondered if these skills might just be intellectual… er… self-gratification. But I have come to appreciate the doctrine of thinking broad and asking questions. Not only is it part of my nature (or nurture), but I’m fairly confident that appreciating fact-finding while not taking everything only at face value makes a person more balanced.

Going to business school flew in the face of this part of my world view. Many MBA curricula reinforce the notion that there are always right answers and that smart means you persevere to construct the right model to find them. That’s what makes management more science-y.

Are there right answers and straight lines in life? Yes. But more often than not, there aren’t.

I’ve expressed before on this blog my concern that such an approach produces manufactured and unimaginative thought. Tooliness, if you will. And have been studying a book by a Harvard Business School professor that reveals that people like me, now the outliers in business school, were once embraced by the MBA… er… paradigm (wow, this is the first time I wrote “paradigm” twice in one composition since undergrad).

Recently, the NY Times suggested that liberal arts staples like “multicultural critical theory” may once again become all the rage at post-financial-crisis-thanks-for-effing-up-the-economy-smarty-pants MBA programs. Everything old is new again.

Generations ago, housewives envied glamorous career women. Now career women envy glamorous housewives. What gives?

Donna Reed

Traditional housework is a demanding job. A good deal of it has been outsourced by manufacturing and commercial consumption. Now we have “light” home responsibilities.

Like lots of other people, these days I find myself wanting to be as environmentally responsible and healthy as possible. I’m learning the value of things like growing my own food, using alternative medicine, having a less toxic home, buying less, reusing more, cooking nourishing homemade meals… This is a lot to do.

Many of the things we think of now as “green” living were part of someone’s job. That person was also largely responsible for everything from childrearing to making soap. Clearly, this role is nothing like the lives of “Real/Desperate Housewives,” who make it seem luxurious and spoiled to be a housewife. This is real work.

Wage-earning spouses made out pretty well. In exchange for their financial contributions, they got a gardener, nanny, chef, tailor, housekeeper, barber, nutritionist, interior designer, events planner, etc.

Now I feel like women are trying to be superstars in outside careers and domestic goddesses at home. Even when we try to share responsibilities, in a male/female household, when your place and your kids are looking a mess, who usually ends up with the blame? The woman.

Women should have equal opportunities and never be forced to stay at home. But what is so bad about a single income household, where there is a wage-earner and someone else responsible for domestic responsibilities? I know that you’re probably thinking, “This is just a woman who envies glamorous housewives and is trying to legitimize that envy.” Maybe.

Acclaimed Native American author, Sherman Alexie, was on the Colbert Report this week. Most of his interview was a rant against the impact of digital media on published literature. Alexie has decided not to make his books available for purchase through Kindle or any electronic book distributor. He argues that digitizing storytelling will ruin its integrity and the ability of artists to earn a living.

The part of me that loves technology bristles at Alexie’s concerns. That part takes serious offense to his disparaging remarks about the “open source culture” of the internet and its devaluation of everything. Ouch. There’s much to rebut this with. He’s being hyperbolic and misunderstanding the brilliant cooperative innovation offered by open source communities.

However, there’s part of me that loves the gritty texture of a book–the same part that collects records and refused to deejay with MP3s until my back started to break from lugging those darn things around. That part empathizes with Alexie and other purists who cherish the authenticity of dogeared leaves of the magical printed word.

Here’s the thing… there are enough of both of those influences to keep old and new school literature alive. Rather than fight the change, we may have to accept that the neighborhood bookstore may persist but more in the form of the neighborhood record collector store. Meanwhile, artists will persist in creating and thriving, as will business interests, in all formats for which there is a demand.

I said I would blog about some of the interesting facts and insights that I am gathering while reading “From Higher Aims to Hired Hands: Social Transformation of American Business Schools and the Unfulfilled Promise of Management as a Profession” by Harvard Business School’s Rakesh Khurana. Think of this as Sharda Cliff Notes.

Here’s one of them. On page 30, Khurana traces the origins of modern management theory to the industrial production process, where the relationship of management and workers as an extension of the relationship between engineers and machines. He cites the influence of Frederick W. Taylor’s ideology of “scientific management.”

Taylor’s methods essentially served to cast managers as the brains of organizations and workers as the brawn, inviting all of the hierarchical implications suggested by that model.

Khurana also mentions recent scholarship by Princeton’s Martin Ruef in the Department of Sociology. Ruef traces management relations from the 19th and 20th century to stategies to subdue and control slaves in the Roman Republic and antebellum south. How much of these approaches to we retain in management strategies of today? Many people do feel like slaves at work.

I spoke at a panel for women entrepreneurs last weekend, where I asserted that community organizing might be an “it” skill of the new generation.

I know there have been a few disparaging public remarks made about “community organizing,” as though it were some sort of euphemism for misspent youth. I’ve worked with quite a few community organizers over the years. I won’t deny that some of them are living in their own stratosphere. However, many others are monumental in skills of doing much with little and are profoundly good at influencing people.

These days everyone from authors to politicians to non-profits to corporate brands are trying to motivate the masses to “follow” or “fan” them. Remember when technology was good to have and how rapidly it became essential to existence? Similarly, having a social presence and community was once a nice bonus but is becoming unavoidable for nearly all of us.

I’m not saying that everyone should go out and try to be a community organizer but we could benefit from looking at their skills, strategy and purpose. How is all this digital wrangling of supporters, friends, and contacts really all that different from good, old fashioned community organizing dressed up in the latest threads?

So, I guess that I would say that there’s hope for the legions of young people who were galvanized around Obama’s message of social progress in the last election, and propelled themselves into organizing (as reported by Elizabeth Mendez Berry in her cover story in the Nation this month). Some of them are struggling to find their place in this discouraging new job market.

Sure they still have more to learn, but I think now more than ever, they deserve credit for a legitimate skill. The many people out there scrambling to make rhyme or reason out of the great new frontier of digital campaigning will hopefully figure out that there is value in putting their experience to good use.

Visionary: somebody of unusually acute foresight and imagination

Tool: One who lacks the mental capacity to know he is being used.

I graduated from an MBA program this year. It was an unconventional route for the likes of me: someone with a ten year track record of being a human rights proponent. MBA and human rights don’t normally break bread together. When business crosses paths with human rights advocates, it’s often at the wrong end of an angry press release. I went looking for a new bag of tricks for innovative thinking. I wanted to get outside of my box but are MBA programs poised to break new ground or are they just a different kind of box?

I’ve been reading “From Higher Aims to Hired Hands: Social Transformation of American Business Schools and the Unfulfilled Promise of Management as a Profession” by Harvard Business School’s Rakesh Khurana. I would seriously recommend this book for every MBA, especially those who fall into the “unconventional” bucket like myself.

Beach reading, it ain’t. It’s way more academic and dense than the typical MBA article/case but it’s brilliant and thorough. Presumably most MBAs will never bother to wade through it and many have zero curiosity about the social transformations and controversies that created the modern MBA curriculum. But that might just prove the author’s thesis: MBA programs have deviated from their original purpose of producing thoughtful intellectual leaders with broad business acumen, and instead have become vocational factories for corporate managers.

He has some good points. I’ll share as many as possible on future blog posts because, like I said, not everyone likes to read 500+ pages on this kind of thing. One of them relates to me as a liberal arts college graduate. We’re a bit against the grain in business school. We like controversies, critical thinking and chasing interesting experiences (even when we don’t get paid for it).

Turns out MBAs were originally conceived as liberal arts poster children. Instead of learning formulaic thought, they were supposed to ask probing questions and think different. Is this true for MBA programs today? If not, what does the change from “higher aims” to “hired hands” indicate about contemporary business leadership?

Coldplay Sells a Million Digital Albums, Confirms Downloads Are King

BY Kit Eaton

Coldplay is the king of downloads. According to Neilsen, the band has become the first to sell over one million digital albums in the US, and over two million worldwide. It may be surprising that this hasn’t happened before, but it basically confirms something we all knew anyway–digital downloads are the future for music.

Irrational markets: people reject free money out of anger

The Ultimatum Game, in which test subjects respond to take-it-or-leave-it offers, has allowed psychologists to explore how humans handle issues like fairness and punishment. But a new study shows some people attempt to punish even when the rules of the game are stacked in a way that makes it impossible.

The re-branded INS, ICE (U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement) is cracking down hard on American Apparel for employing undocumented workers. I, for one, think it’s a crying shame. I’m fairly certain that people are toiling away without papers in sweatshops across the land. At least this is a company with humane labor practices and a decent wage. If you’re going to go after American Apparel and CEO Dov Charney for poor taste in advertising (their ads use a troubling kiddie porn aesthetic), I’m all for it. But viable manual labor jobs are hard to come by in the States these days. What could this possibly accomplish other than making Lou Dobbs happy?